In my capacity as legislator, I would also like to ask Prime Minister @Pronoun whether the incumbent administration intends to issue any releases as mandated by the Sunshine Act? My purpose in asking is to assess whether the Act, in its current form, imposes obligations that may be too burdensome to fulfill. Accordingly, even if your response is in the negative, please do not construe this inquiry as a critique of your administration.
I recognize that there was extensive discussion on Sunshine Act reform in the Assembly last year ([2438.AB] CRS + Sunshine, [2441.AB] Sunshine Act Reformulation), and that @Roavin also submitted a legal question to the High Court regarding compliance with the Act ([2406.HQ] Government Accountability in Sunshine Releases). I found many of the proposals in those discussions to be very good and well-reasoned, and I intend to reintroduce Sunshine Act reform to the Assembly this term. I am preparing a proposal of my own, but before doing so, I believe it is prudent to first make this inquiry.
I’ve taken a look at preparing Sunshine Act releases but it may take a while. For instance, I started by looking into the term most recently overdue for release, which featured zero internal forum topics and over a thousand internal Discord messages in one channel alone. It’s possible to just assume that the Cabinet summarized or quoted their significant discussions on the forums (see Sunshine Act 1.3), but it seems implausible to me that the Cabinet could have gone three whole months without having any discussions worth documenting on the forums. Alas, it takes a while to read through over a thousand messages, especially when they’re in the same channel and not demarcated to indicate different topics of conversation. I don’t know if it’s too burdensome to fulfill, but it will certainly take a while.
That said, forum documentation alone isn’t a silver bullet. I know past Cabinets have sometimes just copy-pasted the entire contents of a Discord channel onto the forums every six months, but that still makes it equally burdensome for someone else to review all of those messages six months down the line.
That’s my understanding.
It’s worth noting that some formerly internal discussions were made public in February 2023 when ministry-specific subcategories were deleted. I don’t think that was ever announced as a Sunshine Act release, but frankly it’s really hard to track down which topics were made public versus which topics were always public, so I wasn’t planning on listing out any of those in Sunshine Act releases. They’ve been public for two years without issue, so consider them released
Thank you for the prompt reply. I really appreciate it!
By the sound of it, it does appear quite burdensome. I would certainly not fault you or your administration if you are unable to review all the materials and issue a release. Moreover, you should not be held accountable for the non-compliance of previous administrations.
Oh, that is quite interesting. I likely would not have come across that thread on my own. Thank you for sharing!
Once again, thank you for your response. I look forward to further discussions with the executive on Sunshine Act reform so that we can hammer something out that is both effective and practical.
I’m partial to a move towards a more discretionary release system as well. Either that or we have a new function/role that works independently to release these materials because they are otherwise quite onerous tasks (afford a trusted individual the necessary privileges to go about it; recalling that Nak did so previously).
I like the idea of having a specially-appointed inspector general come in and do these Sunshine releases for us. I also recall when Nak did it, and it worked out pretty well. On top of that, having an inspector general acting independent of the executive sounds like a good idea because they can come in and make sure that no PM is hiding anything, not that that would happen normally, but it’s a good check to have on the executive.
